Justified True Belief

(●) The finest theological mind among the English Puritans, who lost a deanery, a university and the right to preach lawfully rather than let anyone but Christ prescribe how God is worshipped. + For five years John Owen ran the University of Oxford. He was dean of Christ Church, which meant head of one of its colleges and of the cathedral that serves as that college’s chapel. He held the vice-chancellor’s chair, the office that does the university’s actual governing while the chancellor lends his name from a distance. He had Cromwell’s ear. And when the Long Parliament, the assembly that sat through the civil war and the years after it, wanted a sermon for a national occasion, his was one of the names it sent for. By the time he was fifty he had lost every piece of that, and was preaching to a few dozen people in rooms that the law had made illegal. He is on a Christian apologetics site for two reasons. The first is what he wrote: the most careful English defense there is of what the cross actually accomplished, a book called The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, and the most searching English account of how the Holy Spirit changes a person, a book called Pneumatologia. The second reason is quieter, and it matters just as much. Owen argued, in print, that the state cannot make a man believe and should stop trying. He argued it while he held power and again after he had lost it, and he first set the case down in 1649, when his own side held the swords. That is the only time such an argument costs anything. One fact about him is worth carrying through the rest of it. He and his first wife buried ten of their eleven children, and the eleventh, a daughter, came home from an unhappy marriage and died of consumption before her father did. The man who wrote so much about grief in the face of God had been taught the subject at home.

(●) 1616 AD: He was born in an Oxfordshire vicarage, to a father the authorities had already marked down as a Puritan. + John Owen was born in 1616 at Stadhampton, a village a few miles south-east of Oxford, where his father Henry was the vicar. Henry Owen was what the seventeenth century called a Puritan, and the word did not mean a killjoy in a tall hat. It meant a member of the Church of England who thought the Reformation in that church had been left half finished: too many ceremonies kept on from the old religion, too many bishops with too much power, too little preaching. A Puritan of that kind did not leave the national church. He stayed inside it and argued, and was watched for it. Owen later described his father as a nonconformist all his days and a hard labourer in the Lord’s vineyard, and the phrase has the sound of a son who had watched the labouring. The boy was quick, and the family did with him what families do with a quick boy. After some early teaching at home he was sent to a small private academy in Oxford run by a tutor named Edward Sylvester. The early memoirs say he had outgrown it and entered Queen’s College by the age of twelve, though the university register does not show him matriculating, that is, formally entering his name on the university’s books, until 4 November 1631, when he was fifteen. Either way he went through the place at speed: his bachelor’s degree came on 11 June 1632 and his master’s on 27 April 1635, when he was still in his nineteenth year. He paid for some of that. For several years he allowed himself four hours of sleep a night, and told friends long afterwards that he would gladly trade back all the learning he had bought that way for the health it had cost him. He was not a scholarly weed, though. He threw the bar, a contest of hurling a heavy iron rod as far as a man can, went leaping, rang church bells, and took flute lessons from Thomas Wilson, who had taught Charles I.

(●) 1637 AD: He walked out of Oxford rather than submit to the new statutes Archbishop Laud had given the university. + William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of Oxford, was rebuilding English worship around ceremony. In 1636 he handed Oxford a new code of statutes, the body of rules by which the university was governed and its members were required to live, chapel attendance and clerical dress included. Behind the statutes stood the ceremonial he was pressing on the whole country. Rails were to be put around the communion table. Heads were to bow at the name of Jesus. Ministers were to wear the surplice, the white linen gown kept over from the old church, and the prayers were to be read from a fixed liturgy, a set order of service with the words laid down in advance and no room to depart from them. All of it was enforced. A reader may well wonder what there is in a linen gown and a wooden rail to be worth a man’s career. To Laud this was order and reverence, and a church that had come loose needed both. To Owen it was a human committee legislating about how God may be approached, and he thought Scripture had settled that question already. He said so later in a sentence that reads like a man still angry: that the principle that the church may invent anything at all in the worship of God, in matter or in manner, lies at the bottom of the superstition, the blood, the persecution and the wars that had spread over the Christian world. So in 1637 he left, at twenty-one, giving up a career he had been running hard at since he was twelve. Ambition had been the engine until then, and he was honest about it afterwards: he had wanted eminence in church or state and had not much minded which. He went instead into gentlemen’s houses as a private chaplain and tutor, first to Sir Robert Dormer and then to Lord Lovelace. When the civil war came and Lovelace declared for the king, Owen left for London with nothing in particular arranged.

(●) c. 1642 AD: A preacher whose name he never discovered lifted a darkness that had lasted months. + In London, Owen went through a long stretch of what his biographers call spiritual distress and what a modern reader would recognise as something close to depression with a doctrinal centre to it. He could not tell whether God had anything for him at all. It lasted, by the accounts, a matter of months, and then it ended in a way he seems to have found almost embarrassing. He walked to Aldermanbury Chapel one Sunday morning to hear Edmund Calamy, a famous Presbyterian preacher who drew crowds. (Presbyterians held that congregations should be governed together, through graded assemblies of ministers and elders, rather than by bishops.) A stranger from the country climbed into the pulpit instead. Owen’s companion wanted to leave and try another church; Owen was too tired to walk further, and stayed. The stranger prayed simply and then announced his text: "Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?" (Matthew 8:26). Owen prayed under his breath that God would use this man, of all men, to speak to him, and by the end of the sermon the thing had lifted. He tried hard afterwards to find out who the preacher had been, and never managed it. The story comes from Owen’s earliest biographers rather than from his own pen, but it is told the same way in all of them, and it fits the rest of him: the most learned Englishman of his generation was put back on his feet by a nobody from the country whose name is lost. His first book followed in 1643, A Display of Arminianism, written against the followers of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, who held that the grace God offers a man may be accepted or refused. (The licence, the permission a book had to be given before it could be printed, is dated 2 March 1642 by the old English calendar, which began its year in March rather than in January.) It is a young man’s book, sharp-elbowed and confident, and it did him a favour he had not planned: the parliamentary committee he dedicated it to gave him a parish.

(●) 1648 AD: From a country parish in Essex he published The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, the book that made his name. + The committee sent him to Fordham in Essex, a small village above the valley of the Stour. In the parish register he signed himself pastor rather than parson, which was the word every man before him in that book had used, and the change of one word is worth a moment. A parson holds a living inside a parish drawn on a map. A pastor has a flock. Soon after he arrived he married Mary Rooke, and over the years that followed they had eleven children. Ten of them they buried young. The one who outlived her childhood, a daughter, married a Welsh gentleman, left him, came back to her father’s house, and died there of consumption, which is what that century called tuberculosis. When the previous incumbent of Fordham died, that is, the man who had held the parish before him, the right to appoint a minister there passed back to the patron who owned it, and the patron gave it elsewhere. The market town of Coggeshall, five miles off, invited Owen at once, and there he preached to something like two thousand people. It was at Coggeshall that he changed his mind about how churches should be organised. He had been a Presbyterian, holding that congregations are governed by a graded system of assemblies. Then a book arrived from New England, John Cotton’s The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and reading it moved him to the Congregational or Independent view, that each gathered congregation under Christ governs itself. It was an awkward moment to change sides, since Presbyterianism was then winning, and he never made the change with much noise. In 1648 he published Salus Electorum, Sanguis Jesu, Latin for the salvation of the elect, the blood of Jesus (the elect being those God has chosen to save), though the book has been known ever since by its English subtitle, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (T1). The licence for it is dated 22 January 1647 by the old calendar, which is January 1648 by ours. He told his readers it was the fruit of more than seven years of inquiry, and it reads like it. That same year the royalist army was besieged in nearby Colchester, and Owen preached to the parliamentary troops outside the walls. That is where Thomas Fairfax, the general commanding the siege, noticed him, and where his life stopped being a country pastor’s.

(●) 1651 AD: Cromwell made him dean of Christ Church at Oxford, and then head of the whole university he had walked out of. + On 18 March 1651 the Commons, having considered the worth and usefulness of John Owen, master of arts, ordered him settled in the deanery of Christ Church, and the early lives say he first read about his own promotion in a newspaper. On 9 September 1652 Cromwell, by then Chancellor of Oxford, made him Vice-Chancellor as well, which handed him the day-to-day running of the university. He was thirty-six, and he was running the place that had shown him the door fifteen years earlier. Before that he had gone with Cromwell’s army as a chaplain to Ireland and then to Scotland, which he did not enjoy and did not pretend to. He turned out to be a good administrator, which is not what anyone expects of a great theologian. He kept the colleges teaching through a revolution, protected the Hebrew and Greek chairs, and left the university in better academic order than he found it. What he would not be was a courtier, and that ended him. When Parliament offered Cromwell the crown in 1657, Owen judged it a new tyranny in the making and helped draw up the petition from the army officers that killed the proposal. The friendship cooled immediately. On 3 July of that year Cromwell resigned the chancellorship and his son Richard took it on the 18th, and before the autumn was out Owen had been replaced as Vice-Chancellor by a Presbyterian, Dr John Conant. At the end of September 1658, a month after Cromwell’s death, more than two hundred Congregational ministers and delegates met at the old Savoy palace in the Strand. The confession was drawn up by a committee of six, and Owen and Thomas Goodwin led it. What they produced, the Savoy Declaration, kept the Westminster Confession almost word for word on doctrine, that being the statement of faith an assembly of theologians had drawn up at Westminster for the whole nation a decade before, and replaced its church government with their own. It is the one document of his that outlived the Commonwealth intact.

(●) 1660 AD: The Restoration took everything back, and the best of his writing began. + A few months before Charles II landed, Owen was put out of the deanery of Christ Church. He went home to Stadhampton, where he owned a small estate, and pastored the handful of people he had been preaching to on his free Sunday afternoons. Two years later the Act of Uniformity of 1662 required every minister in England to accept the national church whole, its prayer book and its government together, and on a single day, St Bartholomew’s Day, it forced roughly two thousand of them out of the Church of England. The Great Ejection, it has been called ever since. Owen spent the rest of his life as an illegal preacher in a country that fined, jailed and informed on such men, one of the people that age called dissenters: Protestants who would not conform and were punished for not conforming. The offers came anyway. The first Congregational church of Boston invited him to New England; the accounts differ on whether he meant to go, and Anthony Wood, who disliked him, wrote that after Owen resolved on the voyage the wind was never in the right quarter for it. He was reportedly offered a bishopric if he would conform, that is, if he would accept the terms of the national church and come back inside it, and he asked instead for toleration outside the church rather than preferment, meaning a paid appointment, inside it. He wrote and argued for the dissenters through the Conventicle Acts, the laws that made it a crime for more than a handful of people to gather for worship outside the parish church, was nearly caught more than once, and moved from London to Kensington and then to Ealing for the air as his health failed. He also did one small thing that outran all his books. He went to hear John Bunyan, the Bedford tinker, whenever Bunyan came to London, and he pushed his old tutor Thomas Barlow, by then a bishop, to get Bunyan out of jail. The king is reported to have asked him how a learned man could go and hear a tinker prate, and Owen to have answered that he would gladly give up all his learning for the tinker’s ability to preach. The story comes from the memoirs rather than from either man, as does Owen’s share in the release, which John Asty set down in the earliest life of him. What is not in doubt is that The Pilgrim’s Progress came out from Nathaniel Ponder, Owen’s own bookseller. These were the years of the great books, and they came out of a man with no pulpit he could legally stand in: the exposition of Hebrews in four folio volumes, a folio being the largest format a book was printed in, the kind of volume that wants a table rather than a lap; Pneumatologia on the Holy Spirit (T4); The Doctrine of Justification by Faith; Christologia. In January 1676 Mary died. About eighteen months later he married again, a Dorsetshire widow named Michel, formerly the wife of Thomas D’Oyley of Chiselhampton, and for the first time in his life he was comfortably off.

(●) 1683 AD: He died on the anniversary of the Great Ejection, with his last book at the press. + The last illness was long and painful, an intermittent fever laid on top of everything else that was wrong with him. On 22 August 1683, too weak to hold a pen, he dictated a letter to his old friend Charles Fleetwood through his wife. Two mornings later William Payne, the minister who was overseeing the printing of his Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ, came to say goodbye, and told him the book had gone to the press. Owen said he was glad to hear it, lifted his hands and his eyes, and then said, in the words the early lives preserve: "But O! brother Payne! the long wished for day is come at last, in which I shall see that glory in another manner than I have ever done, or was capable of doing in this world." He died that day, 24 August 1683, at Ealing. It was St Bartholomew’s Day, twenty-one years to the day since the ejection of 1662 had turned him and two thousand others out. Eleven days later a procession of more than sixty carriages followed him through London to Bunhill Fields, the burying ground of English dissent, where Bunyan and Defoe and Blake would also be laid. David Clarkson, who had shared the pastorate with him at the end, preached the funeral sermon the following Sunday, and what he said was that they had had a light in this candlestick which did not only enlighten the room but gave light to others far and near, that it was now put out, and that they had not sufficiently valued it.

What He Taught

(T1) Christ’s death did not make men savable. It saved the men it was for. + Think about what a ransom is. A man pays a kidnapper for the return of one particular hostage, and the hostage comes home. Nobody says afterwards that the payment made the hostage’s release possible in principle and that everything now depends on whether he chooses to walk out of the room. The payment did something. It got him back. That is Owen’s whole case in The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, and it is aimed at a view then gaining ground in England, that Christ died for every human being without exception and thereby made salvation available to all, leaving it to each to accept or refuse. Owen’s reply is not mainly about who is on a list. It is about what a death for sin is. If Christ bore the actual punishment of actual sins, then those sins are paid for, and a paid debt cannot be charged twice. So he sets out the possibilities, and he thinks there are only three of them. Either Christ bore all the sins of all men, or all the sins of some men, or some of the sins of all men. Then he walks the reader down each one. - Take the third, and every man still has sins of his own left to answer for, so nobody is saved at all. - Take the first, and nobody can be lost, since every man’s sins are paid for, including the sin of unbelief. - That leaves the second, which is the Reformed doctrine usually called definite or particular redemption: Christ died to save particular people, and they are saved. Christians have never all agreed with this, and Owen knew it. Arminians answered that he had turned a person’s death for sinners into a piece of bookkeeping, and the old distinction between a death sufficient for all and one efficient for the elect, which Owen himself works through at length, has gone on doing service in his own tradition. But he put the question about as sharply as it can be put, and the question he put is one every reading of the cross has to answer: did Calvary accomplish a salvation, or only make one possible?

(Q) "God imposed his wrath due unto, and Christ underwent the pains of hell for, either all the sins of all men, or all the sins of some men, or some sins of all men." + Source: John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, book I, chapter 3 (Goold edition of the Works, volume 10). Owen introduces it as "this dilemma to our Universalists," by whom he means the men who held that Christ died for all without exception, not people who expected everyone to be saved in the end. He ends the paragraph, after taking each branch in turn, with a line that is pure Owen: "Let them choose which part they will." The sting is in the first branch, where he asks whether unbelief is a sin, and if it is, whether Christ bore its punishment too (T1).

(T2) Kill sin every day, because sin will not take a day off from killing you. + In 1656 Owen preached a short series to undergraduates at Oxford, many of them teenagers away from home for the first time, and published it as Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers. Mortification is an old word for killing, from the Latin mors, death; to mortify a sin is to put it to death rather than to manage it, the way a man manages a debt he has no intention of clearing. His text was Romans 8:13, "if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live." What makes the book last is that Owen shuts the two easy exits at once. The first is forgiveness put to the wrong use: I am forgiven, so this particular sin is not the emergency it feels like. Owen answers by pointing at the people Paul is actually writing to. They are already alive in Christ and already forgiven, and they are the ones being told to do this, daily, for as long as they live. The second is willpower, a hard shove against the habit itself. Owen watched men try that, and he says plainly that it fails, and worse, that it produces either despair or a quiet self-satisfaction, which is a bigger sin than the one being fought. His own answer is that sin is killed by the Holy Spirit, and that the Christian’s work is to keep putting himself where the Spirit works: at the cross, in the promises, in prayer, in the honest naming of the thing. He is also the great diagnostician of self-deception. He notices that a sin fought only when it becomes embarrassing will come back, that a man who loves his sin will always find the doctrine that excuses it, and that the moment you decide you have this one beaten is the moment it is winning. Anyone who has tried to change a habit and watched it come back in a new costume knows exactly what he is describing.

(Q) "Do you mortify; do you make it your daily work; be always at it whilst you live; cease not a day from this work; be killing sin or it will be killing you." + Source: John Owen, Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers, chapter 2 (Goold edition of the Works, volume 6). He has just quoted Colossians 3:5, "Put to death therefore what is earthly in you," and asked who Paul is speaking to; the answer, from the verses above it, is people who have already died and risen with Christ. That is the point of the sentence. The command is not for beginners on their way in. It is for the people furthest along (T2).

(T3) A Christian deals with the Father, the Son and the Spirit one at a time, and what he has from the Father is love. + Most people who believe in the Trinity treat it, in practice, as a doctrine to be defended rather than a relationship to be had. They pray to God in general. Owen thought this was a real loss, and in 1657 he wrote Of Communion with God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost to fix it. Communion here is an old word for shared life, the give and take between two parties who love each other, the difference between knowing a good deal about a man and sitting in his kitchen. His claim is that Scripture gives the Christian something distinct to receive from each person of the Trinity. From the Father, love; from the Son, grace; from the Spirit, comfort. Paul’s blessing in 2 Corinthians 13:14 hands out those three, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, and that division is where Owen takes his stand. He thinks the love of the Father is where nearly everyone goes wrong, because most Christians secretly picture the Father as the hard one who had to be talked round by the Son. He puts it bluntly: they think there is no kindness in the Father toward us except what was bought at the price of the blood of Jesus. Now Christ is indeed the only way to the Father, he says, and he is not softening that for a moment. But the love was not created by the purchase. It is the spring the purchase flowed out of. He appeals to John 16:26 and 27, where Jesus tells the disciples not to imagine he will have to plead with the Father for them, "for the Father himself loves you," and to Romans 5:5, where God’s love is poured into the heart by the Spirit. Practically, this is the warmest thing Owen wrote. He tells the reader to sit down at the fountain and taste it, and says that so much as we see of the love of God, so much shall we delight in him, and no more. His own image for the ordinary Christian’s inner weather is a man living underneath the thing he believes, in a region of hopes and fears, storms and clouds, when the air just above is perfectly still.

(Q) "Few can carry up their hearts and minds to this height by faith, as to rest their souls in the love of the Father; they live below it, in the troublesome region of hopes and fears, storms and clouds. All here is serene and quiet." + Source: John Owen, Of Communion with God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, part I, chapter 3 (Goold edition of the Works, volume 2). The weather picture is his, not a modern paraphrase, and the last sentence is doing the work: the calm is not somewhere else, it is directly overhead (T3).

(T4) Nobody talks himself into being a Christian; the Spirit makes new life where there was none. + Owen’s largest single subject was the Holy Spirit. Pneumatologia, published in 1674, is the fullest treatment of the Spirit in English and has never really been replaced, and he kept adding to it for the rest of his life in separate volumes on faith, on understanding Scripture, and on prayer. The title is simply Greek for a discourse on the Spirit, from pneuma, breath or spirit. The heart of it is regeneration, which is the old theological word for the new birth: not a man’s life improved but a life begun. Owen sets it against the two things people most often mistake it for. It is not baptism by itself, and it is not moral improvement, a person deciding to live better and managing it to a degree. Both of those leave a man essentially as he was, tidied. Owen argues from Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in John 3 that what is needed is a birth, a new principle of life put in from outside, because the flesh can only produce flesh: "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit" (John 3:6). And he reaches back to the first page of the Bible to say what kind of act that is. In Genesis 1 the Spirit hovers over a dark, formless deep that has no life in it and no tendency toward life, and the new birth, Owen says, is the same Spirit doing the same kind of thing in a human being. He guards the other flank just as hard. Regeneration is not an ecstatic experience either, a rapture or a voice or a fit of feeling. Owen had watched enthusiasts of that sort at close range during the Commonwealth, and he thought a Christianity built on inner thrills was every bit as far from the new birth as a baptismal certificate was. What the Spirit makes is a new set of loves, and a man finds out what he loves over years, not in an afternoon.

(Q) "There was a spiritual darkness and death came by sin on all mankind; neither was there in any man living the least principle of spiritual life, or any disposition thereunto. In this state of things, the Holy Spirit undertaketh to create a new world, new heavens and a new earth, wherein righteousness should dwell." + Source: John Owen, Pneumatologia, or a Discourse concerning the Holy Spirit, book III, chapter 1 (Goold edition of the Works, volume 3). He has just walked the reader through Genesis 1:2, where the earth is without form and void and the Spirit moves on the face of the deep. The parallel is the argument: the same Spirit, the same absence of any raw material to work with, the same result out of nothing (T4).

(T5) Punishing a man for his religion needs a better warrant than the absence of a verse against it. + On 31 January 1649, the day after Charles I was beheaded, Owen preached to the House of Commons, and printed with the sermon a short treatise called Of Toleration, and the Duty of the Magistrate about Religion. The magistrate, in that century’s language, is not a man in a small courtroom hearing local complaints. It is the civil power itself, king or Parliament, whoever holds the sword. And toleration did not mean approving of an opinion. It meant not fining, jailing, exiling or hanging the person who held it. His central move is about where the burden of proof sits, and it is still the best thing in the essay. The word toleration sounds like the positive claim and non-toleration like the modest one, so it is always the people arguing for liberty who are made to prove their case. Owen says that has it exactly backwards. Not punishing a man is not an act. Punishing him is. The Assembly of the Church of Scotland had argued that God never told anyone to tolerate error, and Owen’s answer is that this proves nothing at all, because a positive action needs a positive command behind it. He then takes the usual arguments in turn. An error in doctrine is not the same thing as a disturbance of the peace, whatever a nervous government feels about it. And the Old Testament laws against idolatry, which the Israelites lived under as a covenant nation with God as their king, will not stretch to cover ordinary doctrinal mistakes in seventeenth-century England. He drew a line, and where he drew it counts against him. Owen excluded Roman Catholicism, on the political ground that it owed allegiance to a foreign power he thought incompatible with English government, and he did not think opinions that broke the public peace in their own nature could claim forbearance. That is a real limit, and it is not the only entry on that side of his ledger. But the argument he made against his own side, while his own side was winning, is the one that traveled.

(Q) "Clear light is needful for men who walk in paths which lead directly to houses of blood." + Source: John Owen, Of Toleration, and the Duty of the Magistrate about Religion (1649), section I (Goold edition of the Works, volume 8). The sentence before it is the one that sets it up: it does not suffice, Owen says, for men to report that they have searched the mind of God and cannot find that he ever commanded a toleration of error. Somebody has to produce the command to punish. He had the executions of the previous century in view, and he meant the phrase literally (T5).

(Q) "I am going to Him whom my soul has loved, or rather who has loved me with an everlasting love... I am leaving the ship of the church in a storm; but whilst the great Pilot is in it, the loss of a poor under-rower will be inconsiderable." + Source: John Owen, letter to Charles Fleetwood, printed in full in Andrew Thomson’s Life of Dr Owen, volume 1 of the Goold edition of the Works. Thomson places it on the day before Owen died; the letter itself is dated 22 August 1683. The omitted clause is Owen’s aside that this everlasting love is the whole ground of all his consolation. He could no longer hold a pen, so his wife wrote it down for him. Fleetwood had been one of Cromwell’s generals and was an old friend; the storm is the persecution the dissenters were still under, with no sign of it lifting. The word Owen chose for himself, after a deanery, a vice-chancellorship and twenty-four volumes, was under-rower: one of the men on the lower bench, who pulls where he is told and cannot see out.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Three centuries of English-speaking Christians have gone to him to learn what sin is and how it dies. + Owen’s reputation could easily have died with the Commonwealth, and for a while it looked as though it would. What kept it alive were the short books on the inner life: Of the Mortification of Sin, Of Temptation, The Nature, Power, Deceit and Prevalency of Indwelling Sin, the exposition of Psalm 130. Ministers kept handing them to people in trouble, which is how a book survives when its author’s politics have lost. Jonathan Edwards read him in eighteenth-century New England and worked over the same ground, the difference between a real change of heart and a convincing imitation of one. Charles Spurgeon called him the prince of divines, divines being the old English word for theologians, and told the students of his London college that to master Owen’s works was to be a profound theologian. Anyone who has tried knows what he was asking. The prose is genuinely hard, long Latinate sentences with the main verb a long way from the start, and a reader can lose the thread twice in a paragraph and still be sure the thread is there. The nineteenth century also gave him his standard edition, William H. Goold’s twenty-four volumes published at Edinburgh between 1850 and 1855, which is what everyone still cites. Then, in 1959, the Banner of Truth Trust reprinted The Death of Death with an introductory essay by J. I. Packer that argued, to a generation that had stopped reading the Puritans altogether, that Owen was not a dry scholastic but a pastor. That essay did more than any other single piece of writing to bring him back into circulation. He is now read in abridgements and paraphrases by people who would never open a folio, which would probably have amused him and certainly would not have offended him: he wrote the little books for exactly that reader.

(†) He had a leading hand in the confession that Congregationalism carried to New England. + The Savoy Declaration, agreed on 12 October 1658 by a drafting committee of six in which Owen and Thomas Goodwin took the lead, looked like a document with no future when the monarchy came back eighteen months later. In England its immediate effect was small. Across the Atlantic it became the standard. The Synod that met in Boston in May 1680 adopted it as the confession of the Massachusetts churches, and Connecticut followed at Saybrook in 1708. The English Baptists had taken the same route in his own lifetime, drawing up in 1677 the confession they published openly under their own names in 1689, which follows Westminster and Savoy closely on doctrine while parting from both on baptism. So the pattern Owen helped set, a shared Reformed confession joined to congregations that govern themselves, is the shape a great deal of English-speaking Protestantism still has. A good many congregations keep it without ever having heard his name. The other half of the inheritance is the argument about conscience. Owen spent the 1660s and 1670s making the case for the dissenters in print, most substantially in Truth and Innocence Vindicated (1669), his reply to Samuel Parker, who had argued that the magistrate may bind the conscience in matters of worship. The plea Owen and others kept making, that a church which needs the law to fill it has already lost the argument, was eventually granted in the Toleration Act of 1689, six years after he died.

(†) Where his own record goes against him: the toleration he pleaded for had a fence around it, and he built the fence while he had the power. + Two things in Owen’s public life are hard to square with the man who wrote about houses of blood, and both belong to the years when his side was in charge rather than out of it. - The Humble Proposals of 1652. On 11 February of that year Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye and Sidrach Simpson brought a scheme to Parliament, taken up that spring by its committee for the propagation of the gospel, with a short list of fundamental principles of Christian religion attached. Men who would not hold those articles were to be kept from preaching and from printing. It is a long way from the essay of 1649, and contemporaries said so at the time. John Milton headed his sonnet to Cromwell of May 1652 as written on the proposals of certain ministers at that very committee, and asked him to save free conscience from the paw of hireling wolves. The charge that Owen was readier to be tolerated than to tolerate is not an invention of later critics; it was made in his own lifetime, by a man on his own side of the war. - The sermon of 31 January 1649. Owen preached to the Commons on the day appointed for humiliation after the execution of the king, a day of public fasting and repentance ordered by the government, on Jeremiah 15:19 and 20, "they will fight against you, but they shall not prevail over you, for I am with you to save you and deliver you." He said nothing directly about the killing, and kept clear of any opinion on it. His defenders point out that he preached under order, that silence was not approval, and that he took the occasion to press the case for toleration on the men who now held everything; his critics have said that a minister who accepts the pulpit on such a day has blessed the thing by standing in it. Thomas M’Crie called it the greatest blot on his public life, and the judgment is not unreasonable. Set against that is the change in him afterwards. The man who wanted heretics silenced in 1652 spent the last twenty years of his life on the wrong end of the same principle, and he did not use the position to ask for revenge on anybody. When the Lord Chancellor offered him preferment in the established church, he asked for liberty outside it instead, and the early lives report that he turned down a bishopric to keep asking. He also used what influence he had left to get a Baptist tinker out of prison, which is not what a man does who thinks the state should decide who may preach.